Chapter II: Foreword (2)

So much for our recognizable arts. If we tum to our public life—to our “serious” side—we encounter the same habit. We have social problems: and we solve them. Folks get drunk on alcohol? Easy: abolish alcohol. Roundhead foreigners cluttered up our landscape? Easy: abolish immigration. Dour dramas corrupted Sweet Sixteen? Easy: censor the drama. Crazy communists upset bedtime story mood of bourgeois gentlemen? Easy: jail ’em and let the Supreme Court of the United States outlaw their nonsense. These are all problems they still have in blundering, backward Europe. By gosh, we’ve solved them.

And we’re constructive, too: not merely defensive. Having money means having a good time. We’ve learned that. So we are abolishing every value, and throwing in contempt each occupation, which does not aim at money: either in the earning of it or in the display of it, once it has been earned. And finally, success is success. Having discovered this, there is nothing left but to murder all moods and impulses which would deny this crucial American proposition.

You have the idea. We jolt off more folk in New Jersey in a week than they do in France in a generation, because murder is so consonant with the American Idea. Of course, murder’s the low form of our art: a folk art. (We have our pickpockets, too.) But you can’t get away from it. The murderer is a go-getter. The murderer has a problem, and he solves it. The murderer sees what he wants, and he takes it. The murderer believes in quick action: he is a maker of success: he is a man with results. (“Success” magazines and popular platform artists please copy.)

And all this makes for bad art because—as Goethe put it—“art is long.” The short cut gets you “there.” But what if the “short cut” cuts out life itself? You’ve had nothing on the way. And when you are once “there,” what can you do but start again—on another short cut—for the next place? This is the joker in our competence. We do away with the means: and behold! The Means are everything and the End is nothing. It’s like the modern Sunday afternoon. We used to go nowhere in particular, on foot: and see the country. Now we motor a hundred miles to X. And X is nothing. And we’ve gone so fast, and swallowed so much carbon monoxide gas, that the way was nothing either. So we speed on to Y and to Z, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

To solve the problems of life is very simple. All you need do is to eliminate—to murder—life. That gets rid of the problems: and that explains 99/100 of what men call civilization. For life is all Problem, and the brave dwelling therein: and the solution is death. A good life is the art of avoiding quick solutions. And murder—this so popular American practice, this so simple mechanical means toward a solution—is a good symbol of the bad art of America.

_1925_

5. THE BATTLE OF A CENTURY AND A HALF

PHILADELPHIA (JULY 4, 1776-SEPT. 23, 1926)

The rain was the hero of the evening. The gentle falling rain. It appeared second on the scene, pattering down so modestly just after Tunney had climbed up, and preceding the Champion Dempsey. It was not greeted quite so cordially by the crowd as were Gene and Jack. But ere long it made itself felt. At the end, it held undisputed sway.

The rain was the hero of that memorable hour in which the Mauler of Manassa lost his crown to the Sweet Marine—for a variety of reasons. To begin with, everybody saw the rain; and don’t you dream for an instant that every one of those good 130,000 American patriots who had come so far—at such expense and trouble—just to celebrate their country’s Sesquicentennial birthday, _saw_ the Fight. Did the seats lack visibility? Not a bit of it. A marvel of architectural finesse is the great stadium. But even Mr. Rickard could not stretch the structure of men’s sight nor mold to a more plastic shape the sort of scrap he had staged. The seeing was carefully graded, as everything should be in an orderly Republic.

For $27.50 (up) you _saw_ the Fight, and the stripe on Jack’s trunks; you saw the exquisite process whereby Dempsey was softened, slowed, mauled, unshaped by the obdurate indifference of Tunney. The sum of $16.50 gave you two men—one square head and one oblong—manifestly clad in purple and blue trunks; face and condition a blank, but bodies spinning visibly enough, and hopping and hugging and lunging, boring and jabbing in a ten-round dance. Fairly balanced, they were, under the heavy crown of the loudspeakers. No one went down, no one went through the ropes. Tunney was steadfast and Dempsey was wild. So $16.50 got a mere guess at the decision of the Fight you had come so laboriously to behold. At $10.00, what you saw was a couple of bright bugs with swift antennae, making love or something in true insect fashion—and getting nowhere, so that you could notice. And at $3.30, you beheld, all about a far flame, a spot, a sky of moveless, pivotless heads, a sky rolling with human thunder. And that was worth the money.

But when the rain came, the gentle falling rain, it played no favorites. It did not pour buckets on Mayor Walker’s crown, and drip a mere drop on Paddy. And how the rain was needed! Don’t you believe it put a damper on that mob. Individual men and women may have been disgruntled—although they didn’t show it. But the crowd itself, and the spirit of the show, _called for_ the rain.

In the mists which tided to the crowd from the high shell walls, see a symbol of tedium, and you’ve got the idea. A solid, stolid thing was the mob, massing from the ringside. When the lights that stared from brackets all around went out, the crowd seemed dead. Myriad heads rose from the flanks of the thing like carven facets—like knobs—like artificed protuberances on a woody substance. You felt that a plane, if it were big enough, could run over the vast surface, and smooth it, and smooth off the heads. You felt there’d be a lot of sawdust, and that’s all. You were unjust, however. For when the lights screamed back, shedding their green-blue ice on the hot crowd, you saw that each of these myriad individual knobs had a face: mostly a man’s, perhaps a woman’s, face. The expression was dull, not too lifelike; and almost never varied. But if you doubted the monumental genius of the painter of all those phizes, you couldn’t help admiring the assiduity for going to such trouble.

Then the Fight, to make the stadium come alive. Shouts, cheers, murmurs, ran at first through the inert thing: trickled, jabbed at it, harried—and failed to fuse it together. Many sparks and no flame. The spirit of the evening was not a spirit of fire. Sogginess, wetness—spirit of the rain was what Philadelphia summoned from its weary streets to meet the wearied visitors from afar. And that’s why, when the rain did fall, it was right. You can’t blame Mr. Rickard. How could he know? How could he know, for instance, that this stadium, unlike other circuses, sprawls too horizontal from the ring, is too fluid in its forms to be galvanized into a furious hard passion? A fight scene should be more vertical, more funnel-shaped. Then your scrappers have a chance, with their lean frail arms, to weave a spell to pull the human lump together—fire it, make it the mad, single-howling creature which loomed above Dempsey and Firpo in New York.... And how could Mr. Rickard foresee that his two prize babies, this time, would keep their feet so well?

If the prize fight is to outlive its present mastodonic bulk, and not—like other dinosauri—collapse from sheer flatulent vastness, the pugs’ arms will have to grow stronger so that there is more flooring, or their legs will have to grow feebler, so that there is more flopping. In a huge stadium, you can see a man go down flat—and that is always worth a week’s salary and ten hours’ sweating in trains. But boxing, boring, sparring, dancing, spinning—but a bloody nose and Jack’s shut eye—what’n’ell do such fine points get you, when you cannot _see_ them? The fat ball park developed the fat Babe Ruth. Slugging makes contact with the huge modern mob, where all the place-hitting of Nap Lajoie would be lost. The fisticuff equivalent of a fast-bounding ball in the bleachers is a couple of giants tumbling each other, as in the Dempsey-Firpo fracas. There was none of that in Philadelphia.

The crowds were childish about it; and you cannot blame them. They wanted action: thudding, sudden action. Without it, they were bored. How far they had come! what hours they had voyaged, leaving wife and children! what hours’ hard earnings expended! what sweat exuded! what shoe leather worn away, in order to be in Philly! Was it to see two boxers, bobbing in a white-roped ring? Once they were there, they couldn’t wait to get home. A knockout in round one would have delighted them. Immediate action—what the French in another context call _la jouissance immédiate_—that was the infantile temper of the crowd. They howled down the announcer, when he wasted time on adjectives. They were nonpartisan. They were for Tunney when his blow landed; they were for Jack when the thud of _his_ glove came over the acred heads. They were for anybody who’d bring it all crashing to a decisive thrill. Poor public! Hadn’t they paid two million dollars for _something_? I suppose that is why Mr. Rickard, whose influence with the weather is well known, brought down the rain.

Which leads me to our Showman. The show was, of course, the packed stadium. Or, if you prefer, the show was the show itself. The Fight was the pretext for bringing the show together. To this end, Jack and Gene fought for championship. To this end, one hundred and fifty years ago, our fathers fought for independence. So that Philadelphia might have her celebration and dawdle through it meagerly for many months on such nurture as the Pageant of Freedom (loss $700,000)—and recoup it all in the sudden financial glory of a scrap fight, which a hundred-odd thousand paid for, and which the radio stay-at-homes alone followed clearly. But if the Show was the show itself—who saw it?

Not the newspapermen, not the frontiersmen in the wide, cheapest spaces. All of them erroneously had their eyes on the ringside. The chief appreciator of this thing of beauty was the chief creator of it: Mr. Tex Rickard himself.

From 8:00 to 9:30 P.M. I followed this enraptured artist as he moved from entrance to entrance of his golden dump. I was happy to catch the esthetic gleam in his eye, and to hear him murmur:

“Gee! Only look at ’em all! See that silver blimp tipping the stadium askew as if we were on a boat in a storm. See that Penn State Building yonder, like a city in the air. See the heavens rolling, rumbling near. All so fluid, all so fairy-like—above the solid substances of my crowd! One hundred thirty thousand ... solid ... solid ... _paid for_! By Michael Angelo,” cried our leading modeler of mobs, “it’s worth earning half a million dollars to make a thing as beautiful as this.”...

And so, to make that beauty perfect, he summoned down the rain. It worked on the crowd like water on a thirsty plant. It eased them—brought them together. It gave them something more immediate and urgent than that distant dance in the ring. Water, drooling from one bosom to another, joined them. The little raindrop, bounding from head to head, made brothers as it bounded. We knew that our forefathers, fighting for freedom, had fought to make a Nation, after all.

Men and women removed their hats and swathed their heads in handkerchiefs that gleamed in the gloom like turbans. The stadium turned Oriental; the fight fans became worshipers at some rite. Now, the remoteness of the bout was good—since a rite before an altar should be occult. Now, the cavortings and borings of two men on a light-blazed box seemed fitting. And it was well that a little man in an incongruous dinner coat should make noiseless speech under a diadem of arcs and amplifiers; and that his voice should loom, by some sudden miracle, into each shadow of the conchshaped pile. And, finally, it was right that at the very end, at least a hundred thousand of the worshipers (who had, they thought, come to _see_ a fight) should stand quiet until the Metal Voice belched forth the news to them of _who had won_.

Slowly, sweetly they plashed away through the mud and the motors, toward their distant homes. Through the waterlogged rhetoric of a National Fair which needed a prize fight to put it on the map. And the heavens wept gently.

But when we reached the Penn Station at Broad Street, all my hopes for mankind were reborn. With a greater drive than Dempsey’s, with more stamina than Tunney’s, silent mobs of men stormed with drenched bodies through the gates—to the New York trains. And then I knew that my brothers, after all, were capable of enthusiastic action when some high purpose urged them.

_1926_

6. ENNOBLING OUR CRIMINALS

So it has come to this. They’re advertising for the crook and the yegg. The first practical sign of the uplift was in the modest little placards which blossomed out some time ago in the “L” stations: they reminded prospective robbers of ticket offices that, _if they were caught_, they’d get from six to seven years. The suggestion, of course, was: not to be caught, and doubtless some few courageous men were thereby inspired to do better work. But now there are to be flamboyant posters—every bit as good as the old ones which urged us to Buy Liberty Bonds, to Save Sugar, to Save the World from the Kaiser.... These new works of democratic art speak out to all whom they concern: “You CAN’T win. Ships Don’t Sail Beyond the Arm of the Law.” Or, “You CAN’T win. You Have to Get All the Breaks. One Little Slip Means Sing Sing.”

It is fair to assume that these exhortations are not addressed to the little girl who works all day in a milliner’s shop; nor even to the plumber riding home from his pipes. There must be a criminal class, large and plebeian enough to use the streetcars, to whom these advertisements are devoted and whom they are aimed to improve. This is highly significant as perhaps the final proof that we are a democracy. I feel, however, that much good material is neglected by not putting the posters also in the taxis.

At last the criminal class is to be exalted. Today, of course, it is small pumpkins to hold up a bank clerk or sandbag an aged millionaire as he saunters from his club. Mediocre men—men of conservative instincts and cool passions—have degraded the ranks of crime. All this is now to be changed. The crook is to be challenged! The yegg is to be dared! “YOU CAN’T WIN” shout the ads. This will, of course, discourage the weak members. It will fire and inspire the strong ones. It will weed out the cautious crooks. It will raise the moral and spiritual standard of the whole fraternity of pillagers, marauders, brigands, thugs and pirates who grace our peaceful land, and serve to circulate moneys and emotions.

Dick Turpin, Robin Hood, the great corsairs, had no encouragement like this. They worked against a spirit of states and peoples which in every way encouraged “virtue.” When one thinks of the drawbacks of those days one wonders that picaroons, spielers and strong-arm men survived at all! It merely goes to show the indestructibility of genius. Men were discouraged from peculation by thoughts of God, and by the subtle suggestion of the priests that it was _harder_ to go straight! Moses had thundered: “Thou shalt not”—with the assumption that, of course, _thou couldst_. Jesus of Nazareth went even further. He made it clear that it was almost impossible to be good. For ages, the aristocracies and the churches kept up their propaganda, discouraging crime on the ground that crime was easy, forgivable and mean.

We have changed all that. “You can’t win my swag!” challenges the banker, knowing well that this is the very tune to inspire the daring crook against him. Indeed, the best of this new scene of our Democratic Drama is the altruism of the leaders.

They have suffered, after all, very little from holdups. Crime has been endemic, but sporadic. The land buccaneering art needed uplift and stimulation. It needed the standards and the token of popular support which advertising—that university of democracy—alone would give it. Enough vivid posters encouraging superior youth to bust safes or board bullion-carrying motors—through the method of challenge and of a call to adventure, and we can look forward to the day when all banks will be broken, all rich ladies stripped of their jewels, and all motors in the hands of thieves, save, of course, those taxis which are already run by licensed yeggmen.

Our ruling class disproves the cynicism of the materialist philosopher. Are they not now inspiring a criminal class, with educational posters, to despoil them?

But perhaps there’s a way out of this dilemma, after all.

Everyone knows that about fifty years ago our pioneers and pork-barrel experts instituted the campaign which has resulted in the present flood, throughout the land, of novelists and poets. Advertising methods in those days were more intimate, because the science had not been standardized. Yet the process was essentially the same as that now begun for the benefit of our criminal classes. Instead of shouting in posters, it was whispered about: “Write Poetry—and Starve.” “Creators—You Can’t Win. The Possessive Arm of the Law Will Get You, Even in Paris.”

The result, of course, was Greenwich Village, and our ten thousand Little Theatres. In the bright lexicon of youth, there’s no word of challenge like CAN’T. But the crowning stroke of this maneuver for supplying our land with a sufficiency of poets, was the system of awards and prizes which has since sprung up.

The creators, of course, were first _challenged_ into existence by the possessors. Then, those who were wise enough to make their imagination and their art work _for_ the possessors, were paid sumptuously in coin.

Similarly, bank robbers and holdup men must first be inspired to know the dignity of their calling. These posters will help to draw the right class of energetic youth. All that remains, then, will be to announce positive rewards for those criminals who make good.

_1925_

7. READING THE SPORTS

Oh, how glad I am that spring is coming and that baseball’s here! For once again, I can get something from the papers. I am what America would unanimously call a highbrow. Put me down as that, since the Majority Rules. It is because I am a highbrow, spending my days and nights in philosophic contemplation, that I rely on the sports in our dailies. During these last months, life has been bitterly empty. At its best, pro football is a vague business, and tennis is the sort of game you must see in order to believe. I have suffered frightfully for lack of news. But now I am myself again. The sun shines promisingly in my window. Mayor Walker has thrown out the first ball and at last I can spend my pennies evening after evening, for Baseball Finals: certain at last of having _news_ to read.

It is, if you insist on explanations, because I am a highbrow spending my days and nights in philosophic contemplation that I require the sports. You don’t see? Well: let’s examine the matter like two highbrows together.

I prop my morning paper carefully (so as not to spill it) against the water tumbler, with its edge held down by the plate which holds my grapefruit. Right column spread: Briand and the League of Nations. Do I read it? No. Why do I not read it? Because I am not concerned in International Affairs? Wrong again. It is because I am concerned in International Affairs, and know something _about_ International Affairs, and know a good deal about papers—that I skip this column. For I am aware, whatever the true crux of the crisis, that I’ll not find it printed. Vague conjectures, superficial facts, details, a perfect avoidance of everything causal—of all that _counts_ in this particular matter—this is what my faithful paper spreads before me, on International Affairs. Next door, an article about the Police and Bootlegging and the Crime Wave in our city. I am exceeding interested in all crime news, and in the liquor market. That is why I skip the column. If I desire to be sure what really happened, I must wait till I can drop in on the boys who know one thing and who write another.... Left column: the big story about Congress. It also fails to qualify. Nothing but the hot air is in the print. The real plots, plans, motives, are as far from this open page as are the committee rooms and dining rooms of Washington from the visitors’ gallery at the Capitol.

I turn the page. I fare no better. Discovery of ruins in Yucatán, Egypt, the Gobi Desert. I know the “desk” has sedulously deformed the trickle of “quick” news which the telegraph has shot across the sea.... Divorce? I’ll get none of the violet rays of subtle human truth in this odious, scarlet, lyingly “whole” report. Taxi smashup? Perhaps the names at least are right (though even they may be misspelled, unless they’re famous). Music? I happen to know too much about music to marvel convincedly at Marion Talley’s voice.

Ah, but here is the book page! I may glance at the ads. They tell me at least, with a modicum of truth, that Mr. Mencken’s new novel is out; and that the Hexameter Epic to which Mr. Broun has devoted so many years of silence is to be published in the fall. But will these lengthy and pontifical disquisitions about the current output give me either _facts_ or credible _opinion_? Alas! I fear not. There is more honesty and candor here than in the sections devoted to politics and crime. But not more competence. Real information about books and art requires an informer with background and perspective, and fairly permanent esthetic standards.

And I crave facts! I’m a highbrow: I want to _know_ at least of SOMETHING that’s happened in the world, since yesterday. So I turn to the sports page.

I am told that Babe Ruth fanned three times, and I believe it! I am told that Vance pitched as good a game as that famous one of Walter Johnson’s, five years ago in Detroit. I’ll stake my dollars, it’s true! Here is the statement that the Giants blew in the seventh and the Pirates hammered five earned runs. I know it! I know the runs were earned! (What a relief it is, to know anything at all in our chaotic world—when even the atom has crumbled!)

I am pretty certain that these boys in the Majors are really Major Leaguers, and deserve to be there, by the best of baseball standards. I believe these baseball critics. I am willing to accept, without the tedium of a personal inquiry, that the fellows who are playing in Paterson or Oshkosh are not as good as their brothers in Big Time. But I am quite as sure that the real Major Leaguers in politics, law, business, literature, education, are usually ignored by the papers; whereas every morning there’s a new crop of tenth-rate Minors in the five-column spreads.

McGraw would stand for no Mayor Hylan in his line-up. It wouldn’t pay _him_, as it paid Tammany. No sentimental blurb can hide the fact if Ruth has batted .170 for a week. No lack of a blurb can blur the fielding and batting splendor of George Sisler. There’s plenty of stuff about the past, that we believe in; plenty of hopes for the future. But today—what can we believe today? In the sports I get rare satisfaction, for I can say: “It’s in the papers, and I do believe it.”

You’ve got to have _some_ certainties at breakfast. You’ve got to have _some_ English written in a style living, appropriate, honest. There’s plenty of fiction: forty pages, daily, in our average-sized journals. Forty pages of cake. That’s all very well. But, being a plain highbrow, I need a little of the bread of fact. Thank the Lord for baseball.

_1926_

8. THE NEW CONQUISTADORES

So I went to Florida for a rest....

Of course, I left all my money there in real estate ventures, and had to return by boat. This is a cheaper way than Pullman, and I soothed my pride by arguing that it would round out my experience. In Miami, Sarasota, St. Augustine and Jacksonville, I had encountered nothing but millionaires. There must be a nether side, an “other half of the world,” even in Florida. More modest revelers in sunshine surely must go south by winter and doubtless I would find these coming north by boat.

I was mistaken. The steamer was crowded. Every cabin and berth were occupied by men and women who, according to admissions obliquely and nonchalantly let fall in talk, were larded with money. Everyone had tried to get a _de luxe_ stateroom, alas! and had failed. Everyone, moreover, was traveling by boat because of a tender love of the sea. There was not much wind; but a good portion of our company were sick. Nor do I recall any gazing at the ocean, save on one or two instances when porpoises were sighted. Perhaps there was more sea to the voyage than the pampered landowners had bargained for. It is true that from beginning to end the boat was utterly surrounded.

And besides, there was too much of an intellectual, cultural, public-spirited nature to discuss on board for any childish pleasure in salt water. These were men and women on a holiday. Yet, everybody knows that the athletic mind finds rest, not in lazing, but in a simple change of the topic of cerebration. These men and women had gone South ostensibly in quest of sunshine, alligators, golf and bathing. Their alert minds had soon discovered that Florida today was the very apex of American progress, the cynosure of all live American eyes, the ideal of every purse possessed of the creative impulse to increase and multiply. What more inevitable than that, returning to their estates in Kalamazoo, Newark and the Bronx, they should discuss and discuss?

We were foregathered in the smoking room.

“They are sure doing wonders down there in Florida.” A heavy Elk spoke with gleaming eyes. His chest was deep and so was his voice. It was strange how two-dimensional those eyes seemed.

As the four others of us round the table nodded and sipped our near beer and chewed at our cigars, I became aware of a strange presence overhead. The smoking room was fitted out after the fashion of an old English inn. In the ceiling were open rafters clouded in smoke. And here, straight above us, through the darkling mist, I saw another group of men gathered like us about an oaken table.

At first, I thought that there must be a mirror in the beams, catching our group through the haze; for these men above were placed like us. But as my vision cleared I saw that they were different, after all. They were clad in steel coats of mail; swords swanked angularly at their sides; they wore flaring boots; armored gauntlets were drawn off, and freed the harsh-haired fists of conquistadores clasping silver goblets filled with ruby wine.

My neighbor answered—a weasel fellow, all grey, whose nose seemed in a perpetual tremor of scenting and searching:

“Why, Jacksonville’s population alone has doubled in ten years!”

—_Tell the Padre that we have made another hundred converts_, came from the smoke-veiled rafters.

“They got 268 manufacturing plants that can turn out $50,000,000 worth of goods a year.”

—_Our first stone building at San Agustin is a school for the Indians._

“You know that filling-in of marsh water front at Sarasota cost the Ringling Brothers about $10,000. They sold it at $13,500 the acre.”

—_The new Cathedral was built by Christian natives. We have sent the deed of the property as a gift to the University of Salamanca._

“Miami has a transient population of 90,000. That’s what pays ... the transients.”

And over my head the echo:—_We are being urged to marry with the Indian if need be, and to settle. Are these men not the hidalgos of a great land? Has not Don Francisco called them brothers of the Spaniard?_

“Fifteen thousand hotels in Florida.” The Elk eyes glowed.

—_A Mission in the Everglades at last!_ was the refrain.

“The whole thing is stupendous,” came the shrill voice from the grey man at my side. “It’s the greatest land rush in the history of the U. S. A.”

“Which means, in the history of the world,” said a surgeon who operated in lots on the side. He was a man burly and sinuous. There was in him something of the otter and a good deal of the boar. “Why, compared to this, the great movements of history—the gold rush into California, the dash to the Klondike, the opening of the Middle West and the Northwest with Harriman and Hill, were puny.”

He was an eloquent as well as learnèd speaker. And as each glorious instance rolled from his soft mouth, there came an echo mysteriously transformed by the smoky rafters....

—_Movements of history ... passage of the children of Israel across the Red Sea ... the quest of the Holy Grail ... Crusades ... Columbus._...

“But it ain’t business only!” I protested.

“You bet not,” said the Elk. “‘Come to Florida and see the nation at play.’” He quoted the great line without hesitation.

I saw our nation at play. Motoring ... movies ... lot jugglings ... motoring ... walnut chocolate fudge sundaes and bad booze ... motoring ... boosting, boasting ... motoring....

Overhead clinked silver goblets. The conquistadores were humming a “malagueña.” From the mist about them came a glow as of mellow vineyards yielding sunny wines, and of women dancing. Below, hard lips told of sport.

Said our Elk: “I dropped in on the Yankees at St. Petersburg. Those boys clear a fortune even out of training.”

The tale of sport from overhead was different. Honor and love were counters; the players risked life and joyously won death.

“Not alone a nation at play,” exclaimed the surgeon. “Florida is a frontier with all the culture of the capitals. Here is a whole state being opened up, with the best accommodations! For modern improvements, New York’s got nothing on it.”

“And they ain’t forgot religion,” added the grey man with the tremulous nose. “They just put up a church in De Land, cost $300,000. You bet I bought all the lots I could in a town like that. Where they spend money on a church, they’re going to stick. A swell church means business.”

—_Our Mission was builded by volunteers from the old Settlements elsewhere. They were not paid, of course; but we had to shoot many infidel natives who did not understand why we wanted to build so fair a church in a land that was not ours. Yes, many were killed and some were tortured. There is no room for infidels. We let the gold go home for the greater glory of our Gracious Queen._

“Well,” cried I, emptying my mug of legal beer, “Florida is certainly a hum-dinging first-class show of American progress.”

“It’s enough to make you proud,” said the Elk.

“—and rich,” smiled the sly surgeon.

“Why, in Jacksonville every guy in town’s got to wear a big button—and if he don’t, you just bet he gets into trouble. It’s yellow and on it is printed in red [those are old Spain’s colors, you know]: WE ARE BELIEVERS IN JACKSONVILLE.”

—_We are believers in God_, came clearly from the rafters.

_1925_

9. TWO FACES

In the literary office of a certain magazine there is a vast table piled with books. “Mostly junk,” the editor will explain. My hand feathers the outskirts and picks a volume with title: “Calvin Coolidge. His First Biography.” I am not permitted to speak of it here. Nor shall I linger wistfully over the so symbolic circumstance that a book about a living President should be a thing void of ideas, vile in composition, rancid, and false in spirit. Within its covers, I found the portraits of two faces: one of the President and one of the President’s mother. Thereby hangs my tale.

She was beautiful. She looks out at you in a black dress of satin, sterncuffed in white, high-collared, with a cameo at the throat. The hands lie demure in the lap. The hair is drawn tight and sideways to the ears. She looks out at you, not so much from the frontispiece of a book as from New England.

She is impressive. The sharp small chin is firm. The mouth is pursed, its prim lips faintly flexed into a downward frown. The nose is straight. It has delicacy; its nostrils seem to quiver not from emotion, but from restraint of emotion. Under the plastered hair is a forehead high and ample: a square forehead which is the feminine form of the stern unsubtlety of pioneers. It holds a mind serene through exclusions, correct through lack of doubts. The eyebrows are straight as a whiplash. Above them the flesh puckers like a girl’s, ere the forehead’s rigor claims it. But the eyes are deep-set as in some dark seclusion.

They glower. Their gaze is reproof. And their sight is a shadow. Pain lurks in them, muted and proud, and constant. There speaks a virtue assumed, a mastery willed: almost a habitude of judgment. The eyes dominate all. Under the girlish brows with their faint fleshliness, above the exquisite nose, within the contour both fragile and brittle which the folded hands whitely enhance, these eyes are paramount. Tenderness turns hard; frailty assigns itself master; weakness wills itself mighty. The result is a transformation. This face, so gracious in its elements, gives for its final word inhospitality and shutness. The result, in more personal terms, is Calvin Coolidge.

His face is the response to his mother’s. She was the obscure farmer’s wife in the Connecticut River Valley. There, as with countless other women, her loveliness had its begrudging bloom. Winters long as a siege, summers of swift fever, the inclement lordship of Puritan ideals, made her astringent. Weather attuned to will hardened this flesh and drew the spirit down to the sure rigor of material affairs. Virtue became a saying of Nay and an economic cunning. Poetry took property for symbol. And so at last, on a certain Fourth of July, this daughter of New England gave birth to Calvin Coolidge. Not she alone. A whole decadent Puritan tradition gave birth to him; fathered his spirit; molded his memorable face.

The little man waxed great. And as he grew, his face became the caricature of his mother’s fairness. It is a caricature horrible in its significance, superb in its logic.

Chin, mouth, nose, brow, eyes of Calvin Coolidge are children of the splendors strangled in his mother. Her face already is this twilight, is a recession of splendors. Her features speak but greyly an ancestral greatness. Moral power, will, devotion, chastity, singleness of vision, bore this woman. But the essence of their means to life made the mind intense to the exclusion of content; made the beauty neurotic; made the virtue shut. Made, inevitably, their own culminant death whose Person now presides the American lands.

The chin of Calvin Coolidge has grown pointed, out of all proportion: it is a shallow, contentless thrusting. The lips have almost disappeared. The mouth is a crease of shrewd, complacent purpose. The fold of resolution beneath his mother’s nose becomes a dugout of meanness. The nose itself is bulbous, perhaps with too much half-baked nutriment: it is a proboscis of forwardness unchallenged along the path which the canny eyes select from all the paths of the world. The forehead is blown into a windy conch, unruffled and unfilled save with the echoes of dead covenants. It crowns the face like a seashell; and the face itself becomes, beneath it, a pucker of soft parts like some naked creature peering forth for food. The head, indeed, is the Rhetoric of absence. The face is the expression of an immaculate instinct for sure and mean details.

Again, as with his mother, the man’s eyes give the key. They have lost the tragedy of hers. They have flattened, hardened, and come out to the surface. They do not, from a secret depth, glower upon a hostile world: but have pressed, with a twist and a leer, to Victory. They twinkle. They have the lasciviousness of cold possession. They are the logical eyes of the battener on nullities: the eyes of the democratic politician.

So, as Calvin Coolidge, professional legislator, might declare: The Nays have it. Here is a face at last, ultimate and stripped to the model of a will like a machine. A face where no dream lingers beyond the dreams approved by a smug world: a face which no thought troubles that has no answer in the current coinage: a face that knows not passion, unless it be charted and chartered in the Statutes. The mother’s frown is gone with the conflict it expressed. Here, in lieu, is a smirk. All the realms of spiritual risk which her men, good pioneers, to such good purpose barred, have here stayed out, indeed. A race’s turning of its ideal power into the body of Success becomes this face and body, stripped to cunning, instinct with the spirit of acquisition. The symbol becomes a man; the man becomes a symbol. He crawls up the greased ladder of public honors. He becomes a leader and an idol, in whom the mob can worship its own meanness....

_1926_

10. THE DRUG ON THE MARKET

It is prevalent and poisonous. And the land is proud of it. Its manufacture is a huge industry; its sale is a popular art. Billions of dollars are spent in making it: millions more go to the appurtenances of its use: and billions are paid in wages to men and women who devote their lives, openly, to its production, distribution, upkeep. The states all license it, turning a tithe of the wealth spent for it by our people to their own coffers. Great magazines and newspapers grow fatter with its advertisements. Some papers, indeed, are entirely given to its commercial and esthetic aspects. And no publication, however ethical in editing its columns, however adverse to such drugs as coffee or tobacco, refuses to display its blandishments for money.

All America lives under its influence, and does not suspect that it is enslaved by a drug. “Shows” are planned yearly in great towns to propagate its sales and sing its praises. Special sections of the dailies detail its progress. Schools teach the beginner how to enjoy it. And everywhere ordinances and officials tune the whole life of the land to the needs and habits of those who use it.

It comes in varieties of kind which display distinct differences in expenditure of money. And these gradations have a truly hierarchic value. In a democracy where castes are vague, where money-power has few manifest badges of dress or standard of living; where, indeed, millionaire and clerk go to the same movie, read the same books, travel the same roads, and where intellectual distinctions must be very carefully concealed, the conspicuous uses of this drug have become a standard of social status. The lowest classes aspire, first of all, to earn the means of _visibly_ possessing it. When they have risen so far, they may be said to have a foot on the first rung of the Ladder of Success. Thence, they are urged, instructed, exhorted, by advertisement, editorial, numberless methods of herd pressure, to progress upward. It is neither uncommon nor unworthy to mortgage a farm or keep it bare of such luxuries as furniture and books, in order to purchase a more showy form of the drug: one whose effects are swifter and whose price is higher.

Like all drugs, this one has estimable virtues. Its effect is great on the motility of man, when used in moderation. It is a synthetic product. It is not found in a state of nature, but must be concocted; although, of course, from natural ingredients both mineral and vegetable. I do not know how man first came to put it together. Probably his love of new combinations led him. I doubt whether the incentive to increase our mobility on earth was there at the beginning. (The thing, by the way, was invented in Europe; and in Europe, largely still, it is controlled within the limits of good use.) But America soon transformed it from a delicate ornament to the mastering instrument it is today. It increases man’s power to move things, and to move himself. It increases his power to see things. It opens up to him stretches of the world he might elsewise never reach: communities of action and intercourse with other men whom he might elsewise not come near enough to work with.

This virtue of the drug is a positive contribution. It makes it not unworthy to be placed in man’s esteem beside other concoctions long known and loved. Alcoholic drinks, for instance, with their heat-making, cheer-making, fat-making, nerve-relaxing power: tobacco, which is a subtle sedative to mind and stimulant to nerve: coffee and tea which cheat fatigue: opium, morphine, cocaine, ether, by means of which men and women are helped across the crises of the body without the drain of too great suffering.

The drug’s most typical and most desired effect is the sense of _self-motion_. The user feels that he is “on the go.” The faith that he is covering ground or getting somewhere (although that “somewhere” be of no intrinsic value) is, of course, the type of morbid rationalization common to all addicts of all poisons. The sensation of flight is the main matter. The drug is a means of physical escape. It becomes a symbol of psychological escape.

Now, “progress” is an American superstition whose chief feature is movement. To progress, you’ve got to move on: you’ve got to be perpetually passing from what _is_ to what will never, never be—since as soon as _that_ is, it also must be passed. This superstitious tic is potently flattered by the effects of our drug. From being a means of motion and escape, it has grown into a symbol of progress. It began by cajoling our nerves. It ends by cajoling our ideals.

Of course, this subtle transition from use to abuse is generic of all vices. Far too soon, the ill annuls the good which tempted us into the path leading to addiction. But with older narcotics, men have had time to learn the dangers hidden in delight. They have elaborated mental and moral mechanisms to protect them. It is deemed a “social vice” in Europe to drink too much liquor. Men almost everywhere have become “afraid” to employ opiates without the doctor’s sanction. Sometimes this instinct of defense hardens into law. America, for instance, as befits a timid land, was armored by Constitutional Amendment against the ravages of a mug of beer, against the blight of a little glass of wine. (This may not be known to the reader, who can verify it by consulting any lawyer.) The instinct of self-protection is naturally strong in the small and the weak. This makes it all the more amazing that America has developed no defense, and no awareness of the need of defense, against the holocaustic uses of this drug on our market.

The reason is, that we have not yet had it long enough. The lapse from use to abuse has been too subtle and too short. And the reason is, also, that there has been confusion between the sensory effects of the drug and what Americans consider their ideals. The notion, for instance, of bare movement as value—is this, indeed, a human value or is it the delusion of a drug fiend? or the idea of utilitarian progress whereby all present life is successively sacrificed to a never-reached tomorrow? or the standard of measuring worth which makes man neglect himself and give his love only to the accumulation of dead external objects? It might well be argued that such “values” as these are the results of a drug habit, rather than the spiritual traits of a Great Republic.

The key to the popular appeal of this narcotic is, then, an induced sense of flight—idealized into the delusion of “progress.” The addict becomes nervous and restless. He hungers to “progress” with his drug to help him move; and also he aims to heighten the outward splendor of the drug itself, so that the world may judge his “progress” in the world by it. Battening on change, he dares not stop. He must go on moving. And since even motion can become a constant almost as steady as rest, he must be forever changing his pace of motion. His life must be accented motion—ever irregularly accented. And change, from being a means, becomes an end.

Now follow other results. Swift movement, increasing the extension of our sight, enfeebles the intensity and quality of what we see. With the delusion of seeing more, we see less: with the delusion of unfolding more miles of the world, the span of living shrinks. The drug is foe to meditation, to solitude, to careful and loving observance. It frees the addict from resorting to himself in the crises of dullness: he need not explore the devious trails of his soul, when so many, wider, asphalted roads are beyond him. But meditation and leisurely observance are the traits whereby life becomes real.

In lieu of them, we have the bare experience of passing. Moments are not dwelt in; they are overcome. The “present” of life, no longer a treasure to be mined, is a barrier to be vaulted. But moments and places are real to us only in so far as we put ourselves _within_ them. Now with this drug the converse happens: we take ourselves _away_ from moments and from places. Moments and places grow void. Life becomes a succession of zeros.

Within each soul there is a kindred process. The drug is a substitute for thought and for emotion. So hallucinatory is its sensuous effect of “progress” that the addict literally _moves out_ of his troubles. Are troubles not matter for thinking and for feeling? And do not thought and feeling require some rest—or at least some constant, unconscious motion—in order to be enjoyed? This drug of ours, spelling flight, flight from the hour and the place upon us, brings flight as well from the problems of life that fill the place and the hour.... Remains only motion ... only the emotion of motion.

The drug’s use is a short cut: and nothing is more dangerous and sterile. A short cut through time, through place, through life—leads to death! Life is swift, and the value of life is the value of every moment. A machine, an act, a drug which makes us leap this moment is murderous. Alas! here, too, there has been confusion between the effects of a narcotic and what we consider our ideals. For we are proud of the short cuts with which we clutter and sterilize our world. Newspapers, telephones, radios, are imperious short cuts, demanding that we devote an ever-increased portion of our days to details and surfaces of men and matters we might well ignore. The use of this drug eliminates the ground between the “beginning” and the “end.” But both “beginning” and “end” of anything are abstractions, darkness, death. The _between_ is life. So the use of the drug lessens life.

It has another, curious effect upon the user: a subtle one, hard to grasp—but not without importance. It lifts the user from the embrace of living things, setting him, half insulate, in a machine. To walk the earth, to sail the sea, to ride a horse or plod behind one in a buggy—to drink the heady brews of grain or vine—these are all ways of touching life. But to box oneself into a thing of iron, and race through the verdurous world as fast as ever one may, is to get almost out of life, even without the common aid of accidents. It is to exile oneself from the sensuous growing earth which is our ultimate food.

Now, to move is to overcome resistance. And to overcome resistance _too well_ is to avoid life’s loveliness which dawns on men only when they are forced to pause. The perfect, unconscious mechanism of an animal knows neither thought nor beauty. The child begins to think and to enjoy, only when life stops him. This drug of ours induces a child’s heaven—or an animal’s. It makes things too easy: seeing the world, seeing folks, seeing your girl, too easy. And man can stand the adversity which bores him, far better than a lubricated ease. To see an endless series of places is to value none of them. To see too many folks is to see too little of oneself. For the value of things lies, in great extent, in the amount of ourselves we must put forth to get them. Take love-making, for example. Resistance and time are so necessary for its right consummation that even the brutes know it. Make the tryst between the boy and the girl too facile and too swift—eliminate the hazards of invading little brothers in family drawing rooms—and the couple will very soon prefer the delights of a hard-won brown bottle to the delights of each other.

So the vicious circle rounds. And the drug whose use was to bring increased power and joy turns its addict impotent and sad. This specific concoction has done much to make of us a gloomy people. Or, perhaps, it was the other way. Being a lugubrious lot, we have fallen victims to a drug which turns us even worse: making us roll along on lines of motion far less fancifully pleasant than the devious ones induced by alcohol.

Unfortunately the drug’s ill results have not yet made us sick of it. We are merely demanding more of the same. Swifter mobility to kill time and trouble; more elaborate and expensive emptinesses to fill empty holidays. In the American town, the effect is sadly visible. The streets are cluttered with the wheeled instruments in which the drug is used. And the air is fouled with its miasmic fumes. And the poor folk who took to it in order to be free, in order to know flight from trouble, find themselves grooved into traffic lines, manacled by traffic laws, crawling like slaves under the haughty signals of the cop.

Verily, the hour calls for some great solver of problems to save the nation. I think at once of Mr. Henry Ford. He has been so successful in solving our transportation problems. He has earned so much wealth in that beneficent task. And he has shown himself so eager to go on serving his people—if possible, in bigger, better ways! Has he no scheme for curbing the evil uses of this Thing which causes our noble countrymen to roll along the landside in a complacent stupor?

_1927_

TWO: PORTRAITS

I. MEN